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High Achievers

Darius Brown’s educational biography, featured last week in the Dallas Morning News, should be encouraging for reformers. It’s the story of a bright young Texan from modest circumstances who, through his own talents and the prodigious advocacy of his single mother, took part in his district’s gifted program and won a Gates Millennium Scholars award and matriculate to Texas A&M. Unfortunately, his story isn’t representative—even though they account for 6.5 percent of the state’s students, black boys like Darius make up less than 3 percent of those enrolled in Texas’s gifted programs. One of the main reasons for the discrepancy is that too many states and districts still rely on referrals from teachers and parents for screening into such programs, rather than spending extra and instituting universal screening. As Jay Mathews argues in the Washington Post, settling for this narrower pool leads to gifted classrooms that are significantly whiter and more affluent. Above-average intelligence is a category of special learning need; the only thing setting it apart from, say, a physical disability or a lack of English fluency is that it doesn’t always make itself known. That’s why we need to do everything we can to identify and

Children with extraordinary gifts and talents experience drastically different needs. We parents, teachers, and advocates often get nervous calling attention to bright children, and we often fall into the trap of working under the radar or even making ourselves invisible.

When we do this, we pull smart kids into the shadows with us. Hiding hasn’t worked in the past and won’t work in the future. A new approach is required to meet the needs of gifted children. We should borrow the strategies and tactics that other movements—such as civil rights protesters, suffragettes, and environmental activists—have successfully used to inspire social change. It is imperative that we emerge from the shadows and work openly on behalf of gifted children.

As advocates, we must try new strategies and tactics to help society fully understand the nature and needs of gifted children, to create supportive environments for their learning, and to implement research-based practices that help them capitalize on their talents.

If you ask many people, gifted programs exist because “gifted” students have unique needs. But what does this mean? And what is the overall purpose of K–12 gifted education? Even within the gifted education community, the actual outcomes of “gifted” programs are too often unclear, leading to charges of ineffectiveness at best and outright discrimination at worst.

Competing priorities

In one sense, gifted services exist to develop advanced abilities—to provide interventions to those students who need them in order to develop excellence. Some students have unmet academic needs, that’s where gifted education kicks in. Makes sense, right? However, the kids served in gifted programs are disproportionally from white, Asian, and higher-income families. This is a problem for political and advocacy reasons, but also because the majority of American students now come from low-income or racial/ethnic minority families. If the U.S. educational system can’t develop the talents of African American, Latino, or low-income students, what good is it?

In gifted education, there is often tension between two implied goals: developing excellence and promoting equity. In a recent Gifted Child Quarterly article, my colleague Kenneth Engerrand and I tried to come up with a way

Elite public academies like Boston Latin, Stuyvesant High School, and San Francisco’s Lowell High School have long been acclaimed for the top-flight academics they offer to applicants who pass their rigorous entrance exams. Lately, however, they’ve been receiving some unwanted attention: Many now argue that the schools’ admissions practices should be altered to cultivate student populations that more closely reflect the demographics of their host cities. Of course, the issue of race and selective schools isn’t a new one, but it has recently burned so hot that people have begun losing their jobs. PBS’s Newshour, in collaboration with Education Week, has a fine roundup of the debate. One point that’s beyond dispute, however, is that major urban K–8 systems need to do a much better job preparing students of color to enter our best high schools. This objective may call for enhanced gifted-and-talented programming, more funding for magnet schools, and a commitment to a form of academic tracking in the early years. Whatever the ingredients, the aim should be higher-achieving kids.

Education Week’s terrific coverage has actually earned double honors this week, as we hasten to recommend that you check out their special package

Earlier this month, the Department of Education released new data exposing the uneven suspension rates and limited learning opportunities faced by students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Secretary John King is right in saying that the American education system is guilty of "systemic failure" in educating children of poverty and color.

As if locking students out of class through suspension weren’t bad enough, data from the federally funded National Center for Research on Gifted Education (NCRGE) reveals an even more hidden and wicked form of marginalization: the exclusion of poor and minority students from advanced academic programs. According to the NCRGE research, it is virtually impossible— a less than 1 percent chance—for low-income, minority English language learners to be served in gifted and talented programs.

We are optimistic about the true motivations of our nation's educators, and we hope that the narrowing of opportunities for disadvantaged students was inadvertent. It is high time that we rally to implement programs that recognize, support, and develop the talent of children from all backgrounds so that they achieve their full potential.

M. René Islas is the executive director of the National Association for Gifted Children. Del Siegle is the director and principal investigator of the University of Connecticut's National...

During my first year at the University of South Carolina, I often purchased a morning cup of coffee in the university’s student union. Early one morning, I spotted a young man dressed in a business suit and bow tie carrying on an animated conversation with a group of undergraduates. I had regularly encountered the young gentleman—with his ubiquitous bow tie—as I traveled across campus. Eventually I learned he was Chase Mizzell, a leader in the university’s student government. As an avid reader of the school’s daily newspaper, I was able to follow this charismatic young man’s political career.

In reading the Daily Gamecock, I discovered that Chase was an Honors College student from Folly Beach, South Carolina, and a sophomore enrolled in the international business program. I learned that during his freshman year, he was having lunch in the restaurant in the Honors Residence Hall and noticed extra food being carried away at the end of the lunch shift. He asked food service employees what became of the leftovers and discovered that they were thrown away. Chase knew immediately that he wanted to change that. Realizing that the city of Columbia faced the challenges of a growing homeless population, Chase began...

We here at Fordham are really jazzed about the potential of high-quality career and technical education (CTE). Like, really couldn’t be more jazzed—we’ve written blog posts about it, held sumptuously catered events celebrating it, and even published a groundbreaking study about how CTE makes students more likely to enroll in college and earn a decent wage. But there’s nothing in life like the power of an object lesson, so here’s one for you: In Kentucky, where officials have added incentives for schools to prioritize career readiness to the state accountability procedures, we’re starting to see a blossoming CTE sector that benefits students and businesses alike. As one rural teacher puts it, referring to a local manufacturing boomlet, “These are good jobs, and any student who wants a job can get one.” When’s the last time you heard that?

A recent report on gifted and talented education in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., has stirred up some strife that was eminently avoidable. Officials in Montgomery County, Maryland have proposed measures to diversify the local gifted programs, in which white and Asian students are (as is often the case) disproportionately enrolled. That’s left the parents of those students

Students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology produce the highest SAT and ACT scores in the nation. All of the students take at least one Advanced Placement exam, with 97 percent of them scoring well enough to receive college credit. But those high scores don’t come without intellectual cost. In taking preparatory courses for the SAT and ACT, or in preparing for the myriad AP and state tests, students often default to formulaic writing. In doing so, there is an inevitable closing of the mind; the traditional essay becomes the only acceptable mode of response, and oversimplified, superficial, and binary answers are the result.

The good news is that creative writing and standardized testing are not mutually exclusive. By encouraging students to consider multiple genre possibilities in responding to writing prompts, teachers can lead students toward more complex and creative thinking.

An early autumn harvest of five-paragraph nonfiction

In September, our English department gave each eleventh-grade student in the school sixty minutes to respond to the following Virginia End-of-Course (EOC) Writing Test prompt: “Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘Determine never to be idle….It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.’ Do we accomplish...

In my work with hundreds of families, I have observed one common truth: Parents are the experts on their own children, especially when it comes to giftedness. Parents often observe certain characteristics in their children and view them as positive traits—until those same characteristics are regarded negatively in school. Though there may be outside pressure not to accept a “gifted” or “highly creative” label, sometimes that designation is the one thing that can save a child from being misinterpreted and misidentified.

Recognizing the highly creative child

Sometimes it’s not easy for highly creative children to “comply” with a regular curriculum, even at the preschool age. They are wired to explore, experiment, build, imagine, and create. If forced at a young age into a diet heavy on rote learning and directed work, they may struggle. It’s not that these children can’t do the work. It’s that the work does not engage their depth of thinking, their ability to make connections, or their desire to contribute original ideas. Their needs are so much more complex than what a traditional classroom can meet, especially if they want to voraciously pursue knowledge on their own.

If you had a magic wand and could change one thing to ensure the availability of great gifted education services for students in your community, what would it be? A state mandate? More funding? A wide array of service requirements based on what we know about giftedness and best practices for promoting the development of high-ability learners?

In the absence of a magic wand, I might suggest that the next best thing is a robust state policy related to gifted education. Gifted education policies provide a framework for identification, services, teacher preparedness, accountability for student learning, and program evaluation. Together, these elements should define comprehensive, equitable opportunities for high-achieving and high-potential students. A coherent set of state policies not only define issues and practices that are essential to the delivery of high-quality programs for gifted students; they also provide parents, teachers, and other gifted education advocates with leverage to demand appropriate services for gifted and talented students in their communities. Well-crafted state policies also serve as tools for local policy development, assisting boards of education, educational leaders, and parent advocates as they seek to improve their own policies.

In my career as a gifted education professional at the classroom, district,...